In recent years, hosted services have been growing in popularity. In the hosted services model, a hosting provider manages the hardware and software needed to provide a service to a consumer via a communications network, such as the Internet. Consumers of hosted services are known as tenants. Hosting providers can provide a wide variety of services to tenants according to this model. For example, a hosting provider can manage hardware and software needed to provide hosted email services, document creation and storage services, unified communications services, and other types of services to tenants.
The hosted services model can save the tenants from the expense of installing and maintaining the hardware and software needed to provide a service. Furthermore, the same set of hardware and software can provide a hosted service to multiple tenants. Thus, the hosting provider's expense in installing and maintaining the hardware and software can be divided among the tenants.
In some circumstances, the tenants configure a hosted service to access services provided by entities other than a hosting provider who provides the hosted service. For example, a tenant can configure the hosted service to retrieve encryption key data from a server operated by the tenant.